"The Ubuntu development community announced today the availability of Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2, a new prerelease of the next major version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This alpha is the first Ubuntu release to completely omit HAL, a Linux hardware abstraction layer that is being deprecated in favor of DeviceKit."

Game developers stay away from Linux and it isn't because of market share.

A few other factors that might have played role:

1) Even the Windows gaming market is a pathetic shadow of what was 10 years ago - it's mainly just hand-me-down console ports (with the exception of Valve, Blizzard, and maybe-kinda-sorta id). Linux games have typically been ports of Windows games - with the big commercial titles, at least.

2) Last I checked, Wine does a decent job of running most Windows games - which eliminates the need to port, at least from the perspective of commercial game developers. IIRC, that had a lot to do with Loki Games' demise (why buy the Linux port if you've already played the Windows version through Wine?).

3) Games for cellphones were already a big money maker years before the iPhone ever came into existence. And thanks to the way that carriers nickel-and-dime customers for things like ringtones, there's a large number of people who would balk at paying for software on a desktop computer - but who don't think twice about buying a cellphone app.

1) Even the Windows gaming market is a pathetic shadow of what was 10 years ago - it's mainly just hand-me-down console ports (with the exception of Valve, Blizzard, and maybe-kinda-sorta id). Linux games have typically been ports of Windows games - with the big commercial titles, at least.

A lot of 3D pc games these days are console ports but there is a booming casual market for games like The Sims, Warcraft and Peggle. Peggle has been ported to just about everything except Linux.

If you look at proprietary games / market share ratio and compare to OSX it is clear that there is something very wrong with Linux. When a single developer supports Linux it becomes a headline.

Not as good as Windows of course but there are a lot of new games to play.

The lack of commercial developer support has more to do with Linux having too many incompatibility issues between distros and software management systems that are designed around open source applications.

The lack of commercial developer support has more to do with Linux having too many incompatibility issues between distros and software management systems that are designed around open source applications.

This is completely wrong. While Linux has a bigger market share than the iPhone, the average iPhone user is much more willing to pay money for some junk game than the average Linux user. Thus, the iPhone market is bigger.

Games on Linux basically never have to worry about incompatibilities if they do things correctly. All they have to do is statically link and use SDL and OpenGL. A game really shouldn't depend on much more than that. You are correct however that it is hard to develop a commercial desktop app using Gtk+ or Qt. But games shouldn't need to do that.

The fact that there are small indie games such as World of Goo that manage to release Linux ports with relative ease tells me that large companies like EA with 1000x the resources should have no problem with it. It is just a matter of market share. I would love to see more commercial software supporting Linux, but I really don't blame them at all when the market is so small.